Nasa and IBM have joined forces to promote a new application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to Nasa Earth observation satellite data.

The two organisations have revealed their plans to develop several applications to extract insights from Earth observations about the impact of climate change. 

In one of the projects, scientists will train an IBM geospatial intelligence foundation model on Nasa's Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 dataset, a record of land cover and land use changes captured by Earth-orbiting satellites.

The AI is expected to analyse petabytes of satellite data to identify the impact of natural disasters and rising temperatures on crop yields, and wildlife habitats. 

Meanwhile, another project is expected to be a large language model based on Earth science literature. IBM has developed an NLP model trained on nearly 300,000 Earth science journal articles to organise the literature and make it easier to discover new knowledg...